Install kea with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, Nix, pacman, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• kea-admin
• kea-ctrl-agent
• kea-dhcp-ddns
• kea-dhcp4
• kea-dhcp6
• kea-lfc
• kea-msg-compiler
• kea-shell
• keactrl
• perfdhcp

Project history

Kea grew out of the BIND 10-era DHCP work inside ISC. The official manual pages record the first DHCPv6 daemon code in June 2011 and the first DHCPv4 daemon code in November 2011 by Tomek Mrugalski, followed by the DHCP-DDNS process in May 2013 by Thomas Markwalder. In mid-2014, Kea was decoupled from the BIND 10 framework and became a standalone DHCP server with renamed kea-dhcp4, kea-dhcp6, and kea-dhcp-ddns binaries.

ISC announced Kea 1.0.0 on 2015-12-29. ISC's 2015 open-source accomplishments post described Kea 1.0 as a major update with lease expiration, client classification, DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 DECLINE support, PXE and iPXE boot support, and limited MySQL host-reservation storage. The 1.1 release in 2016 expanded host reservations to MySQL and PostgreSQL and positioned Kea for datacenter, ISP, and enterprise DHCP automation.

Adoption history

Kea adoption is driven by operators who need a maintained DHCP server with database-backed leases, hooks, a control plane, and automation hooks beyond the flat-file heritage of ISC DHCP. ISC's DHCP history page frames Kea as a new implementation intended to replace the aging ISC DHCP, and ISC's Kea product page presents it as widely deployed open-source DHCP server software for Linux and Unix-like systems.

Kea also became important to appliance, ISP, and enterprise packaging because ISC DHCP reached end-of-life status while Kea continued to receive active releases and commercial support. That transition made Kea a default answer for packagers maintaining DHCP service stacks.

How it is used

Kea is normally deployed as one or more cooperating daemons: kea-dhcp4 for IPv4 leases, kea-dhcp6 for IPv6 leases and prefix delegation, kea-dhcp-ddns for DNS update requests, keactrl for service control, and kea-shell for interacting with the REST control interface. Administrators configure it through JSON configuration files and can integrate SQL backends and hook libraries for larger operational environments.

Why package nerds care

Kea matters to package nerds because it is the rare infrastructure daemon where the package boundary exposes a whole operational architecture: multiple daemons, sample configs, database schema tooling, hooks, and migration pressure from a famous predecessor. It is also a case study in how a foundational Unix network service gets replaced without changing the underlying IETF protocol.

Timeline

• 2011-06: The b10-dhcp6 daemon was first coded.
• 2011-11: The b10-dhcp4 daemon was first coded.
• 2013-05: The b10-dhcp-ddns process was first coded.
• 2014-07: Kea was decoupled from BIND 10 and its DHCP-DDNS binary was renamed.
• 2015-12-29: Kea 1.0.0 was announced.
• 2016: Kea 1.1 expanded database-backed host reservations.
• 2019: ISC released a migration utility to help translate ISC DHCP configuration to Kea syntax.

Related projects

• Kea is directly related to ISC DHCP, BIND 10, Stork for graphical management, DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 IETF standards, SQL database backends, and ISC's broader BIND and network-operations ecosystem.

Sources

• https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/arm/intro.html
• https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/man/kea-dhcp-ddns.8.html
• https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/man/kea-dhcp4.8.html
• https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/man/kea-dhcp6.8.html
• https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/kea-announce/2015-December/000014.html
• https://www.isc.org/blogs/2015-isc-open-source-accomplishments/
• https://www.isc.org/blogs/kea-1-1-released/
• https://www.isc.org/dhcphistory/
• https://www.isc.org/kea/